


the cold and vast tide (and everything it hides)

by labime



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Pre-Relationship, Siren Caroline Forbes, Sirens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 08:32:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17784035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labime/pseuds/labime
Summary: Her lips are cold, cold like the frozen blood of the men she drowned.





	the cold and vast tide (and everything it hides)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KlaroAJPunk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KlaroAJPunk/gifts).



> i hope that's what you wanted. happy valentine's day!

She notices the blood mingling with salt and water before she notices him.

A thousand icy suns are setting down, pouring pale red and orange upon blue, and the blood comes like a wave, flung away with the wind. She smelled it when she was still underwater, lounging in the coldness of a secluded cave where each moves she made reverberated in a staccato rhythm. And then the aroma came crawling, baldly and strongly, pungent like few things are.

She’s close now, can see the yellowish-brown sand streaked with red, closer to the beach than she has been in moons, having rarely bothered to get too close and make her presence known to potential opponents when there’s always someone venturing too deep into the sea to lure into her trap. Willing victims, more or less. Of course, if they were in their mind they’d scream and fight as the graceful shape of her mouth twists and opens abnormally wide to reveal long incisors and teeth similar to a series of jagged blades closely pulled together, but her voice paralyzes their thoughts, cracks through rationality as easily as her fingers crush sea glass to dust.

It isn’t hunger that dragged her so far from home, from the cadence of rippling water and the songs of her sisters, it’s something deadlier, something she knows better than to indulge in for she has seen countless sailors meet their end all because of the fever of curiosity.

She can feel danger slices through the air in warning and her mother’s voice, an enduring echo of the past, bellows her to stop, but Caroline has never been good at listening and obeying.

 

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

 

She delves deeper into something she can’t name, for she doesn’t recognize it, but she does wonder if that’s what her victims endure when she drowns them blithely on the days she feels bored but not particularly hungry.

Everything is unforgiving in the realms underwater and her species wouldn’t have survived so long if they weren’t equally harsh. They are a voracious and capricious kind, always desirous for something, always confined in prisons of their own making, of their own desires. Caroline is used to it, to feel greed and lust burn white-hot like coals on her skin and poisonous fishing nets digging into her scales and pursue the object of her desire, be it riches or the warmth of a man’s body, or—worse yet—love.

She is used to taking and taking and taking until she finds herself sated, however, abstinence is something she has never known and she’s just starting to understand that being deprived of something she craves makes her suffocate on what should have been a simple interest, turns her attention into an obsession. If her sisters were here, they would have advises to give, for they themselves had their own dalliances with mortal men. But that man—murderer, killer, monster, predator, like her like her like her—is not a man but darkness made solid into a shape fashioned to kill and gorge on blood. An undead.

If everything else hadn’t been enough of a warning that down this path she shall find nothing but misery then this certainly should. She has been instructed to stay away from his kind for as long she remembers, before her mother even grew with child, and before the mother of her mother did, when one of their own was found dead, drained from blood and magic and thrown back in the water like a fish.

And yet—she stays.

She stays and she observes and she catalogs everything in her mind, take everything she learns about him like the skeletons of the bodies that fill the cave where she stores them.

The bones taste like a small, hollow victory.

 

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

 

Everything you can take is something you should hoard, was a common saying.

Sirens were the first to loot and ransack, but the truth often gets lost in the fog of history.

 

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

 

She waits for her fixation to wane, for her attention to pin itself elsewhere, on another man or another novelty, like she might discard a trinket in favor of something more enticing, but for once her soft sentiments for the stranger—Klaus, she’d hear him introduce himself as and his siblings use various variations of his name when they addressed him—who is no longer a stranger seem to well in her ribcage, to spike and touch places it shouldn’t. She is starved and insatiable and Caroline doesn’t need to be told it is a dangerous combination when she thinks, restless and exasperated, that she might just discard prudence and wisdom and cajole him to the water, to her.

One song would be the only bewitchment it’d take to make him fall on his knees and swear his life to her, her voice ringing in the night in a call for him to drown himself in her, but the idea leaves a bitter sourness itching in the back of her throat. She never had to use those tricks on men for them to want her and she does not want to start now.

She is laying on a comfortable rock, back arched and neck tilted with the wind a caress on her damp skin, basking in the rays of the moon looming high in the sky this night when it happens. She's so lost in the labyrinth inside her head where thoughts shuttle and options race that she doesn’t notice the water ripples and splashes as a body rushes towards her and then she is on her back, sand tangling in her curls, sand staining her back and her tail, sand rough and unwelcome against her sensitive scales.

Instinctively, Caroline’s tail flips and trashes and she looks down at it before turning her glare on the man above her who holds her two wrists in his right hand and clasps her waist with his left one, whose eyes are gold melting into red, who shows her a double set of fangs that could rip her flesh apart. Quickly. It’s a clear challenge from him, a threat he is sending with a contemptuous, amused look and a lazy curl of his lips and she reacts accordingly.

She lets the unblemished perfection that serves as bait to entice her victims fade to reveal a skin that is more silver than white and coalesces with slathering scales, her cheeks speckled with blue and green and her bones cracking and breaking as her face elongates, her jaw snapping and lunging for blood, for retribution. She hisses, curling her stinging fingers and images herself gouging his eyes out. Her wrists are aching, the pain extending to her forearms, and ire flares to life as she realizes it is intended. A show of dominance that probably worked on many people.

“You have teeth,” he says, his voice contemplative and a flicker of amusement glowing in his eyes.

“And claws,” she says, using his fleeting surprise to wrench one of her hand free and bury her claws into his jugular vein in the flash of a moment before her hand is taken back into his and shoved down punishingly until her palm is uncovered, webbed fingers splayed wide apart.

She stares at the wet wound she inflicted with satisfaction, the potent scent of blood and red wine merging when he leans down, overfilling her lungs and choking her and she thinks this must be how drowning feels. It is unfortunate that she has to breathe, her gills useless while she is on dry land.

“Who are you?”

“Go to hell.”

“Who are you?” Klaus repeats, with a huff of impatience this time.

He isn’t used to be denied. Well, she isn’t either. She presses her lips together stubbornly and silently refuses to give so much as a handful of truths she’d toss carelessly if it were anyone else asking, if he hadn’t accosted her as he did, if she didn’t already feel bruises blooming in purple and blue and didn’t know she’d never look at those colors in the same way again.

He shifts, their hipbones aligned, and asks, “Is it Mikael who sent you to spy on me?”

“I don’t know who that man is,” she blurts out honestly, breaking her self-imposed silence.

She hadn’t considered how he might interpret her continued presence because she hadn’t paused to think about his reaction if he discovered her, she is used to being adored and worshiped by weak-kneed suitors; suspicion and hostility had never been present when she revealed herself, after all. It is unlike herself to be unprepared and she’s more than a little unnerved.

“I admit I’m perplexed, sweetheart,” he says nonchalantly, like he isn’t still holding her with hands stronger than steel and sharper than the weapon that has been used on her in the past. It makes her bones seem fragile. It makes her feel weak. And she wishes she could lead him deep into the ocean where her powers soar, unleashed and untamable, and her whispered demands are answered by the sea and the wind, where she can control who enters the realms and who comes out of it and how. “I’ve been around for a long time and yet until recently, I believed your kind to be nothing but legends. I’m curious now. Tell me, what do you know of me?”

“Not much.”

“Meaning?”

“Only what I learned since I’ve been observing you. You are an undead—”

“Vampire,” he corrects softly, his voice a jarring contrast to his touch.

“—You drink blood, you have siblings, you like art and beautiful women and ever since you got here you seem to have gone on a killing spree. And your name is Klaus,” she enumerates, shrugging a shoulder. “That’s all I know.”

He scrutinizes her for a long time, his face unreadable save for something hard and cold that seems to settle in his eyes like a thick layer of frost, blue turning to gray, turning to steel.

“I’m sorry, love, but I’m sure you will understand why I can’t take your word for it.”

 

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

 

He says it before his pupils widen and the earth breaks down beneath her and pieces of the sky tumble down with a thousand constellations and the oceans rise and float and swirl and run and she’s engulfed in everything and nothing at all as her world shrinks down to his eyes that don’t look like eyes anymore but like two identical black pits and his will—unbending, unchangeable, unmoving—becomes hers, fills her hollows and shakes her mind. _What are you? Who are you? Do you have a family? Do you have friends? Do you know Mikael? Do you know a Katerina? Had you ever meet a vampire before?_ It goes on and on and on, all questions perfectly calculated, meant to prod and exploit if need be, all but the last. _What’s your name, sweetheart?_

And she answers, the truth falling down like rain, and she gives secrets that were never meant to be shared outside the confines of the sea because if one knows then another will hear. She knows what he’s doing to her but she can’t understand how. Her fallen sisters hadn’t been able to be compelled and, exactly because of that, their gaolers had to resort to torture. What is different about him? She doesn’t know and when it is finally over, Klaus looking satisfied with what he has gotten from her, she still doesn’t know.

“Now, Caroline, was that so difficult?”

Maybe it is the tears of anger she can’t keep in and which roll down her cheeks or the fact he dared to use the name that her mother gave and that he took forcibly from her that sends rage boiling in her veins, flashing black and green in her eyes as she prays, recites the holy words. The first wave is a mere shadow of the walls of water she erects and contorts with a few motions of her hands when she is in the middle of the ocean where time and death and reality are lost to the mist of primeval powers but when it comes it takes both her and Klaus far away from the shorelines, so fast that even he can’t evade the attack.

His eyes brim with incandescent rage but his wrath is matched by her own as she peers down at him mercilessly and starts singing, her voice gliding like silk around his throat, scoring her will into it in a way would have cost him his life if he were human. The rope of her voice tightens around him like a shroud, his body going limp in her arms, his eyes glazed but still reacting. He’s still fighting this, the spell of her song, the magic of the tide, but—she discovers as she burrows deeper into his fenced mind—he has been fighting magic for a long time, the same magic his mother suffused through his veins like venom, like a curse he desperately wants to break.

She asks questions, as he did. The water washing down the insult made to her and as she listens to everything he says, hears him tell methodically the tales of his life, she is disgusted and awed and yearning. He has been everywhere and has done everything and despite her love for her life and her family, her heart is thrumming with wanderlust.

And soon she is teeming with something else.

She cards her hands through honey curls in a tentative gesture, almost as if to ask for permission, like it matters when the kiss she will give him shall push him to the bottom of the seas. His looks at her with an insistent intensity now, and when she presses her lips to his and drains out the life under her kiss, she swears she feels his lips brush against hers with a hint of teeth grazing the bottom lip.

Her lips are cold, cold like the frozen blood of the men she drowned.

 

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

 

In the end, she can’t do it.

She has no explanations.

 

 

.

 

.

 

.

 

 

“I will find you, Caroline,” he calls out as she swims away from the beach she doesn’t intend to visit again soon. She doesn’t know if it is a promise of a threat. “And you will be mine,” he goes on, and she still doesn’t know what it is.

She whirls back, just once, and watches how utterly disheveled he looks, wet and bedraggled, his spotless designer clothes crumpled and splattered with muddy sand, fingerprints marking his skin with seaweed green, trails of blood still visible where she scored his skin.

 _I belong to no one_ , she wants to say, _the seams of my skin were sewed with salt and stardust and my blood is made of a goddess’ tears. My gods are cruel_ , she wants to say, _just like I am cruel, and they demand blood to drink and they demand bones to build homes and the wood of shipwrecks to sleep on when they need to rest. Shouldn’t you understand? You who are a king to your kind, an immortal made of legends and tales and the dust that lands down on burning battlefields after wars are won._

But she says nothing.

She turns her back on him and pretends not to look back once he can’t see her anymore.


End file.
